At an engineering community event, Pinterest head of engineering
Michael Lopp shared exactly that vision is: To fill the gap
between an idea and a specific search. To help people find things
they didn't know they were looking for.

"Today when we think of retrieving information, we think of
search," he said. "If you don’t have a keyword though, you’re out
of luck. If you want to browse, search engines are the wrong
tool. We call this the discovery problem. There's a big
opportunity to help people browse and discover ideas and projects
before they're ready for search phase."

Here's a slide Lopp used to demonstrate his point:

Pinterest

Pinterest wants to be the
resource that users rely on when they've gotten the faintest
glimmer of an idea. By pulling them into its ecosystem, it then
wants to hook them until they're ready to make to their final
purchasing decisions, too.

Getting users to start on your
site whenever they want something is one of the "Holy Grails" of
e-commerce. Google and Amazon are currently battling it out on that
front: As more people start
their searches on Amazon, Google has been ramping up its visual
product listing ads to counteract the effect. Walmart
also has a "semantic" search project, trying to serve
shopping results to people who don't quite know what they're
looking for.

By taking into a step back and
encouraging users to start their searches at that first
inspiration phase, Pinterest is putting its hat in the same ring.

As a step towards that vision,
Pinterest released Guided Search earlier this year to help users
narrow-down results. For example, if you search for plants,
Pinterest will show you a bunch of categories like garden,
potted, outdoor, or hanging to help you more quickly and easily
find what you want.

If you are trying to plan the perfect birthday party and want to
browse Pinterest for inspiration, a quick search could help you
walk-through all of the details, from the cake to the party
favors.

Lopp says that the past few years have been about building and
improving core products, but that next year it plans to build on
this infrastructure to create new ways to search and discover.
Pinterest thinks of itself as building a "save button for the
internet."

Already, the company controls a whopping 23% of referral
traffic to e-commerce sites, and by making it easier for
people to find inspiration (and products) that they wouldn't have
necessarily found otherwise, Pinterest can keep that percentage
growing.

Besides the outline for Pinterest's next steps, Lopp also shared
some stats about the network's growth:

There are 30 billion Pins in the social network's system and that
number grows by 25% every quarter. The site's backend gets
120,000 information requests per second and 20 terabytes of data
logged each day. Pinterest is live in 32 different languages and
75% of its traffic comes from mobile.

Although markets research company RJMetrics estimated
that Pinterest's male/female split was roughly 20/80 in May,
Pinterest says it has doubled the number of active male users in
the last year. The company says that one-third of all sign-ups
are men, and that its male audience is growing at a faster rate
than its female audience.

"More men are using Pinterest in the US than read Sports
Illustrated and GQ combined," Lopp says.

The company added that in its emerging markets — like India,
Korea, and Japan — the site is actually split about 50/50 with
men and women.